Thomas B. Hawks

Director of National Fellowships and Awards

Thomas Hawks joined the Kenyon Department of English faculty in 2007. He teaches poetry writing workshops as well as classes on modern and postmodern literature and theory. His poems have appeared in the Antioch Review,Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Seneca Review, Sou'wester and Western Humanities Review.

Education

2006 — Doctor of Philosophy from University of Utah
1992 — Master of Fine Arts from University of Virginia
1990 — Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University

Courses Recently Taught

Reading World Literature

CWL 333

Literature is world literature when it is read for its truly global significance. To read literature as world literature is to discover its diversity. It is to see how fundamental questions inspire very different forms of literary creativity across the globe--to seek intersections across time and space and thereby to appreciate the many ways literary texts represent their cultures. This course explores what it means to read world literature by focusing on a single theme or problem common to many cultures but different for each. For example, the course might focus on the problem of migrations to see how global literary forms have found different ways to represent what happens when people move from place to place. Or the course might focus on the world's different ways of representing coming of age, or how the environment is figured across cultures. The course studies these themes through focus on texts from nations and cultures not routinely featured together in literature classes. At the same time, the course explores the theory of world literature, as well as the reasons to study it, which include broadening our sense of literature's possible forms and uses, appreciating the world's diversity through its literature, and developing one basis for a sense of global citizenship. Offered every other year.

Introduction to Literature and Language

ENGL 103

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Introduction to Literature and Language

ENGL 104

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking, and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations, and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Writing for the Humanities

ENGL 199

Introduction to Poetry Writing

ENGL 201

This course begins with two premises: (1) that students of the craft of poetry should be challenged to write in as many different ways as possible, and (2) that students are individual writers with different needs and goals. In this course, we will study a variety of types of poetry. Regular writing exercises will encourage students to widen their scope and develop their craft. The course will emphasize discovering the "true" subject of each poem, acquiring the skills needed to render that subject, understanding the relationship between form and content, and, finally, interrogating the role and function of poetry in a culture. In addition to weekly reading and writing assignments, students will submit a process-based portfolio demonstrating an understanding of the revision process and a final chapbook of eight to 12 pages of poetry. Check with the English Department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Prerequisite: submission of writing sample and permission of instructor. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Writing the Modern City

ENGL 263

In this class, we will explore how cities are written -- not only how they are written about, but also how they are constructed, both imaginatively and concretely, through disciplines ranging from poetry to architecture. In doing so, we will try to understand how cities give rise to modern literature and to modernity more generally. In the works of novelists that may include Dickens, Bellow, Balzac, Ellison, Joyce, Zadie Smith, Rushdie and Woolf, we will consider urban landscapes that offer unprecedented economic, political, social and intellectual opportunities. At the same time, we will see how urban life threatens to increase the commodification of experience and how new organizations of social space impose ever greater levels of control and surveillance, calling for new tactics in both literature and daily life. By reading poets such as Apollinaire, Ashbery, Baudelaire, Brooks, Cullen, Eliot, Hughes, McKay, O'Hara, Williams and Whitman, we will explore the role of the crowd, its race and its class. Theoretical works by authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Houston Baker, Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, Ann Douglas, Jane Jacobs, Frederick Jameson, Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford will frame discussions of literary texts. This course meets the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

American Literary Modernism

ENGL 280

Modernist literature was written under the injunction to "make it new." Our discussion will focus on how American modernist writers made it new, and what "it" was, in each case, that they made. We will pay particular attention to the problematics of gender and sexuality and to the permeability of gender boundaries that produced such figures as Djuna Barnes's Dr. O'Connor, T.S. Eliot's Tiresias and Ernest Hemingway's Jake Barnes. In addition to these three writers, we will read selections from Stein, Faulkner, Hughes, Williams and Larsen, among others. This course can be used to fulfill requirements in American studies as well as (in some years) the Women's and Gender Studies Concentration. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Advanced Poetry Writing

ENGL 301

This course sets out to trouble your assumptions -- both conscious and unrecognized -- about poetry: writing it, reading it, responding to it; its purpose, its nature, its public and private selves. We will explore revision in the fullest senses of the word, aiming not only toward compression and economy but toward expansion and explosion, toward breaking down the boundaries between what constitutes -- for you as writer and reader -- poem and not-poem. We will reverse the usual order of things: Our workshopping will focus on canonized poems, and you should expect to engage fully in your role as poet-critic when you respond to classmates' work, approaching it as you approach texts in the literature classroom. We will explore poetry's technologized face through blogs and webzines, even as, Luddite-like, we hand write, cut, paste, find and memorize poetry. This class requires intensive reading (and attendant thoughtful response) in poetry and poetics, enthusiastic engagement with exercises in critique, revision and poem-making, and a final project, demonstrating your advancement as both critic and poet during the course of the semester. Texts will likely include several volumes of contemporary poetry, selected critical essays, manifestoes, writings on process, and readings by visiting writers. Prerequisite: ENGL 201, submission of a writing sample, and permission of instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Offered annually, in one or two sections.

Postcolonial Poetry

ENGL 316

This course will examine primarily Anglophone poetry written by Caribbean and African poets during the 20th century, a period marked by assertions of new national and cultural identities as colonized nations achieved political independence from imperial powers. Students will consider how indigenous cultural expressions from these regions interact with European forms and traditions, and how such encounters transform both indigenous and imperial cultural forms. How do poets "write back" to the metropole to reclaim occluded or distorted cultural meanings or identities? How are these identities then bolstered or contested, both within poems and beyond them, by transnational identities proposed by Negritude or Pan-Africanism? How do commitments to a particular language, gender, race, religion, caste, or class complicate the unifying nationalisms of decolonized regions? We will also attend to literary genre. Why would postcolonial subjects choose to write poetry, particularly when the novel has been so often identified as the principal literary form for articulating modernity, empire and secular life? Do lyric poems provide different ways of thinking about the postcolonial condition than novels do? Should these genre boundaries developed within European traditions even be deployed when examining non-Western literature? Finally, students will consider the relationship between postcolonial writing and postmodern literary strategies like appropriation, mimicry, hybridity and pastiche; how and why do postcolonialism and postmodernism intersect? Exploring these questions, students will gain a more nuanced understanding of a world of Anglophone poetry that has developed beyond, though frequently in dialogue with, the literary cultures of Britain and America. This course fulfills either the "approaches to literary study" or the "post-1900" requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Contemporary American Poetry

ENGL 385

The young Robert Lowell, before he attended Kenyon, wrote to Ezra Pound, "If the 20th century is to realize a great art comparable to that of Chaucer or Shakespeare, the foundation will have to be your poems." James Wright, some years later, wrote his Kenyon honors thesis on "The Will in the Thought and Art of Thomas Hardy." This course offers a sampling of contemporary American poets of the generation of Lowell and Wright and later generations, including Ashbery, Bishop, Gunn, Jarrell, Merrill, O'Hara, Plath, Olson, Ginsberg, Duncan, Rich and Baraka. We will pay particular attention to their dynamic and widely varying relationships with the traditions they inherited and transformed, and we also will attempt to locate their poems within social and political as well as aesthetic contexts. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Individual Study

ENGL 493

Individual study is a privilege reserved for senior majors who want to pursue a course of reading or complete a writing project on a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum. This option is intended to supplement, not take the place of, coursework. Individual study cannot normally be used to fulfill requirements for the major. Typically, an individual study will earn .5 unit of credit, although in special cases it may be designed to earn .25 unit. To qualify for individual study, a student must identify a member of the English Department willing to direct the project and, in consultation with him or her, write a proposal, which must be approved by the department chair. The one- to two-page proposal should describe a preliminary bibliography (and/or set of specific problems, goals and tasks), outline a specific schedule of assignments and describe in some detail the methods of assessment. The student also should briefly describe any prior coursework that particularly qualifies him or her for this project. The department expects the student to meet regularly with the instructor for at least one hour per week or the equivalent. The amount of work submitted for a grade should approximate that required, on average, in 400-level English courses. In the case of group individual studies, a single proposal may be submitted, assuming that all group members will follow the same protocols. Students are urged to begin discussion of their proposals well in advance, preferably the semester before the course is to take place.